Carve your Name in the Falling Rain
by A238
Summary: Working on the assumption that death isn't the end, you can theorise a lot of things that come after. Afterlife, reincarnation? They sound nice, but reality, as we know, is an asshole. The void, soul eating, body snatching, cosmic horror, and Hanzō of the Salamander? That sounds about right. Self-insert/OC.
1. Empty Waking

I always thought of death as a relatively straightforward concept dressed in the robes of something much grander. It's not much more than a switch, really. On or off. One or zero. True or false. As big and frightening as a state of such utter nonexistence is, my sentience gave me the power to boil down death to near simplicity, to reduce the void itself to the subject of a single, effortless question.

 _Yes or no?_

I was wrong. Because of course I was wrong. I'm a human being. We're wrong, all the time and always. We think, we reason, and then we assume the conclusion we came to was the right one. It takes circumstance, an environment, a frame of reference, the truth of a harsh world to bring us crashing back to reality from the lofty heights of our own heads.

Problem was, there was no circumstance anymore. There was no environment, no frame of reference, no truth of a harsh world, no reality to crash into, just like there was nothing to see or hear or smell or touch or taste or even comprehend. There was no more time, no more space, no more of anything than _this_.

 _The void._

I sat, or stood, or lay, or ran, or jumped, or whatever other action or inaction I could possibly conceive, in a darkness that wasn't dark. Darkness required light, and I remembered the terror of the dark to a child's eyes and a child's mind buried in bed and blankets, desperately trying to soak up warmth and push out the night, holding it out strong for coming dawn. But this wasn't that. This wasn't fear or terror or horror of the unknown. This was much, _much_ worse than that.

I was afraid of spiders. I was terrified of spending a life wasted and alone. The thought of a world burning beneath the nuclear flames of war, hot enough to set the sky ablaze, horrified me.

I was _scared_ of all the absence. The word did the overwhelming sensation of a cold fright that violated my entire soul with its glacial, freezing touch little justice, but this place didn't care for that. Not for peace, not for justice, not for right or wrong, and certainly not all the things I had ever cared about. It took all of those things away. But even worse than the total lack of everything I ever knew, I was stuck with my simpleton's idea of death's dead man's switch, a state of nonexistence that existed nonetheless, whether I liked it or not. I was stripped of everything I knew, and left with my biggest failing: thinking I could make death something small.

I would've joked about it, made some more witty remarks to stave off the inevitable philosophical struggle and perhaps entertain whatever divine entities liked this sort of messing with mortals, but that was before I felt the abyss started to gnaw at me.

It was a hungry thing, and it seemed that such unknowable hunger left little room for things like manners, a little bit of dignity and decorum for the soon-to-be consumed. And, of course, for the sake of simple insult to injury – with no small pinch of whatever passed for salt in the void rubbed into that gaping hole of a wound – it was slow, because it had all the time in the world.

With no lungs to laugh, I settled for a soulful chuckle. That nonexistent noise didn't last long, either. Once I stepped without stepping over the corpse of my own idea, I grappled with a few images: gilded gates, geysers of hellfire, warrior's halls, rivers of lost spirits, a place in misty clouds where everyone kind of hung around in cliques and conversation as their path in the afterlife was determined for them. It was all sorts of things, all sorts of religions and mythologies that floated in my headless mind to torment me. Any one of those probably would've been better, or at the very least, slightly more interesting. All I got was an absence of everything and an eldritch nonexistence chewing on my soul like a dog with a bone.

For some reason, I say it like it didn't hurt. The truth was far from painless.

Union, in the pasts of people that came long before me, was an agonising process. It came with blood, it came with violence, it came with war, and it came with death. Harmony was never easily achieved. The lessons of history taught that well, and it seemed some of those seemingly useless lessons in school applied to something much larger than a few bits of paper, a couple dozen scrawled lines of ink and an hour's worth of examination: nothingness itself.

My presence here, or there, or wherever, issued a reaction. I was something; it was nothing. Can't have that, now can we? I was stripped of everything I knew on arrival, but the abyss found another way to take away, to even the score. Predictably, it wasn't like the void one-upped me. It just subtracted the damn points. One-zero became zero all.

In the darkness that wasn't, I was a soul. No more body, no more flesh and no more blood. From within, the abyss started to eat me without jaws. From without, the void started to swallow me without tendrils.

It was pulling and chewing, tugging and gnawing, but it never evolved to yanking and crunching, tearing and biting. The void, the abyss, or whatever I could name it, would never resort to force. What need did it have for force when I would do the work for it? A soul was a flame, a fire that burnt bright and fast. And no fire could last forever against the boundless tides of eternity. The void accepted my reluctance, my gallant, heroic and tragic battle for existence. With the desperate struggle of my will and my resolve, it stretched waiting arms wide open to the dwindling cinders I was becoming, my furious strength of scorching life and wild spirit fading to ash and embers, dust and echoes of what I once was.

Desiring something, I condemned myself to nothing. The void was one tricky bastard for a big ball of absolutely nothing, hard to see and harder to understand as anything more than an idea, a concept that was the closest thing that anything would ever be to _neither here nor there_. On its own, an idea was harmless. With me, it had the fuel of a soul's raging fire, and it became the most powerful thing in both all creation and all that wasn't.

The forceless concept of the void gained force, gained absolute power over all within, and it forced me through itself. I knew, and then I didn't. I felt, and then I didn't. I was, and then I wasn't. The abyss that ate me from the inside worked its way through my soul in one last chomp of miasmatic teeth, and the void that swallowed me and my bodiless existence with misty tendrils pulled me in with one last yank.

As the void embraced me and I embraced the void, my soul dispersed, vanishing into the thin air of nothingness like wisps of smoke.

The paradox was at an end.

... Or, it _should've_ been.

I was okay with nonexistence. Thought I was, at least. After a while, after I'd finally burnt out in my last valiant efforts to _be_ , misty bits of me all over the place seemed to understand what couldn't be understood. How parts of the whole became greater than the whole itself were far beyond me, but I got the gist of the supposedly gist-less: at one point or another, everything would return to what it once was – nothing. I was just a little bit ahead of the curve.

The void, in all its infinite-yet-nonexistent wisdom, thought otherwise.

At my scattered core, there rested something that was not at peace, not at rest: something was still energy, and something was still _something_. Klaxons of paradox went off somewhere and messed up some admin's day. Something inside my dissolved sense of self still fought, still wanted, but the void had already swallowed me. It had tried to accept me, but I was giving it a stomach-ache. The void had no force of its own, nothing to use but nothing itself until a soul fell down from wherever and fire lit up the not-quite dark with the brilliance of a thousand suns. It didn't really have that anymore.

So, nothingness decided it could wait.

The miasma and mist of every last bit of me shook with unrestrained violence, and I was suddenly me again, pulled from everywhere. And then the void began to push me away. Well, it wasn't so much a push as it was a _retch_. The void kind of spewed me out like bad lunch, and I went up its throat so fast I was going down.

I was falling.

And then I wasn't. I stopped, and existence started _screaming_.

A wave of new wetness surged new sense and new skin, overcame me and what I was again before sight came along with it. The lights were turned up to eleven, then twelve and then a million because it was like the sun was staring a newborn in the face from a metre away before it faded into a whirlwind of moving shapes and shadows and giants the size of skin-tone mountains.

Sounds rushed in not a moment later, and it was like the thunder of a hundred storms combined with a tsunami combined with an earthquake combined with the dying screams of a woman somewhere in all of that chaotic mess. My ears rang beneath the deafening sounds before I could even make out anything, voices and words and language that shouted and spoke and sang in a god-awful chorus of aural murder.

To say my heart was close to beating its way out of my chest wasn't much of an exaggeration. Nor was it much of an exaggeration to say the entire world stunk of coppery blood, foul excretions leaking from somewhere far below, and the noxious scent of a little vomit dribbling down from somewhere else.

And then there was the way my body jiggled. And, oh, did it jiggle. It was like being a pond made of flesh, blood and floating bone constantly poked with a stick by some small child with an undying interest in all things rippling. The reverberations through my tiny ribcage were not pleasant.

And then it all stopped again. Every last bit of it – the moment full of screaming, crying, sensation, and deadly, rising awareness of my surroundings – froze.

I could feel. I could hear. I could see.

What I felt was a mixture of cold and warmth, material and skin that felt like gravel rubbed into my behind in the hands of the giant that held me. What I heard was a metallic echo, tinny breath through a tank or mask that made me afraid at a level so basic, it was still trying to understand what a noise was. But what I saw...

I saw white-blonde hair falling down the back of a dark cloak in a dark room, a swirling pattern on the chest of something thick and fabric, a coiled length of chain and sickle by a waist, and a helmet of solid metal that rang with the sound of harsh, sharpened breath through a mask that only just held back the violet poison that rode on foul-smelling air.

When I realised just the where, how and who of all this crazy-ass reincarnation bullshit, I decided that if I had had the lungs and the tongue with the breath and skill to speak the moment I was born again, I would've said this:

"Holy shit, Hanzō of the fucking Salamander is my grandfather."

* * *

 _Well, I had a self-insert/OC idea. Hopefully it's slightly more original than most._

 _If people find this promising, I might try and carve out some time to get an actual story made out of this thing._

 _Until then,_

 _A238_


	2. Silent Screaming

_Why?_

 _Why?_

 _Why?_

The word echoed in calamitous waves, a hungry thing that grew in the dark, lonely spaces of my head, festering and feeding and filling. The only thing left to contend with the word was the crawling insanity of biological impulses.

There was no sight beyond blurs, huge gashes of twisted colour splayed over watery eyes. Sounds were bent and warped, what was speech to the rational part resembling the rattling and hissing of something like snakes to the irrational rest of me. Touch hurt; everything was too soft or too rough, with no room for negotiation. Everything smelt awful. Or maybe it was just me, loosing my bowels on what I distantly thought was cloth.

This body - the body of a baby, the living corpse of a soul I killed - was worthless.

My thoughts churned every moment I was awake, a thrashing mess of violent longing and desperate wishes for stillness. But there was none. There was food, there was liquid, there was flesh, there was noise, there was colour, there was touch, but there was no calm.

 _Why?_

 _Why?_

 _Why?_

No answer came. Between the hopeless echo and the unorthodox torture every waking moment held, I feared it would never come.

But I still had moments of lucidity in the gaps, brief moments wedged in the cracks of times that felt like years. I could still picture that face, those cold eyes, that iron mask, that resonant sound of breath that shook the bones of mortal men. I held on as tight as I could, held on as long as I could. Yet this memory, too, had to slip away into the raging storm of questions trapped in this worthless skull I stole.

How did I know when I now knew nothing? How did I see when I now saw nothing? How did I understand when I now understood nothing?

 _Why?_

 _Why?_

 _Why?_

It was eating me - him - both of us. He wasn't dead, wasn't gone. Not yet. His soul was still here, wailing, crying, wanting, breathing. The cold eyes watched, the mask loomed impassive and metal, and the rasping of breath filled me.

He was the true one; I was the imposter. He screamed inside his head; I wore his skin.

And then I wanted to writhe and claw and rend this body off of me, to tear myself free and float into death. But I could not move, I could not speak, I could not see, I could not hear, and I could do nothing but _think_.

It taunted me. The moment of clarity taunted me. Why? What did it gain? What did it get? What did it want?

It wanted me dead. It wanted me swallowed. It wanted me digested. It wanted me consumed.

The void called, loud and ringing and utterly silent.

No more _why_ filled my head. No more biological stimulus, the signs of first life, crawled along the surface of my mind. No more cold eyes, iron mask, rasping breath.

The void called, a silent beckoning.

An invitation to dinner dangled before me.

 _Take_ , something whispered. _An escape. A chance. A hope. A glimpse. Death. Embrace._

 _Refuse_ , something else spoke. _Child killer. Soul eater. Corpse stealer. Skin wearer. Sacrifice. Respect._

 _Embrace_ , something said.

 _Respect_ , something else said.

 _Embrace_.

 _Respect._

 _Embrace!_

 _Respect!_

 _EMBRACE!_

 _RESPECT!_

I wanted to die.

The boy wanted to live.

I always had a soft spot for children.

* * *

 _Well, that was darker than expected. Hopefully not too jarring a change from first chapter. Might change the previous one to suit this actually._

 _Regardless of that, thanks for reading._

 _A238_


	3. Poison Breathing

Memory was a tricky thing. The hypothesis I remember from my first life was that it did not have a permanent home in the brain, but as impressions left in neurones, a bioelectric circuit made when something new was experienced, reinforced in detail by repetition or depth of associated emotion.

 _My_ brain was gone. _My_ body was dead.

So how, in the stolen flesh I in which resided, could I remember _anything_?

The answer was painfully obvious: the soul.

It had always been debated whether or not it existed, whether the presence of sentience demanded some kind of higher spirit. There was no way to prove or disprove it without... without all of _this_.

And so, trapped, restrained, chained to stillness and hunger and tears and everlasting confusion as to where and who I was in this world, all I could do was remember.

Pictures, fragments, words, shards - they all swirled within me. But behind that shattered electric flow, I could do nothing but stare into the emptiness. And, of course, it stared back.

I knew the abyss well enough by now.

It was there. In the deepest, blackest regions of the strange concoction of mind and soul I was composed of, it was _always_ there, watching, waiting, whispering. It was a silent sound, one that I did not hear but felt. The echoes were slick and damp, dripping with a lack of all things as they crawled in me, tendrils forever grasping and slithering. As subtle and repulsive as it was, I could not help but feel the overwhelming resonance in the bones of this body.

Whatever the void was, it was powerful, and it was ever-present.

My world was chaos, and the void was order - the virulent insanity of life, and the crushing stillness of death.

And then rampant, ravaging hunger and thirst overtook this infant body, someone I assumed was a wet nurse was called in by my sudden cries, and all thoughts of complexity and cosmic horror were forgotten before the grandeur of a giant, lactating nipple.

* * *

I woke to a cacophony of voices. The first instinct was to cry. The voices grew louder, taking turns. One and two, then three, four and five.

But when that first voice, that voice so deep and dark and resonant, spoke with a sudden, cutting calm, the other voices ceased abruptly. Quiet fell over all except me.

And then, through the useless, irritating cries of this body, I heard something - a hiss.

At first an image of a rearing serpent leapt into a far too vivid imagination and the little fleshy thing I inhabited tensed horrifically. But then it drew longer, and it began to sound... _mechanical_ , like the release of a valve. Then the serpent was replaced by a different image, an iron mask inhabited by something no less venomous.

I couldn't see it, but I knew. I knew somewhere in the sounds I had heard and the voice that spoke and the fear that accompanied all of it that this was him. This was Hanzō.

The long, toxic hissing continued, and a metallic clunk sounded within it.

I couldn't see it, but I knew.

He was taking his helmet _off._

The fear took hold. The tears halted. The bones and the blood turned to ice. So very infantile, and this body already recognised absolute terror.

I remembered enough through the haze of rebirth, through the hell of this body, through the nightmares of oblivion that plagued me that Hanzō breathed poison. The mask was a filter, a gas mask that worked both ways. If he took it off, the breath that spilled from him would be lethal. He would inhale air, and exhale death.

A tiny part of me rejoiced. The rest of me recoiled.

I did my best to wriggle and writhe, but I could barely move beyond kicking my legs and thrashing my arms futilely against everything. So very infantile, and this body was still useless.

I needed to move, but I could not. I needed to run, but I could not. I needed to live, but I could not. My mind was racing from fear, and my body was frozen in place by its own worthless state. There was no way out.

A metallic thud echoed.

I stilled. This body stilled. My mind stilled. I could do nothing but listen.

Breathing, rhythmic and strong, sang in my ears. Footsteps, lighter than air and silent as the grave, made the floor creak almost unnoticeably. Hands, rough and callused but warm, grasped me. I did not fight as I was lifted for what felt like forever. Colours wheeled overhead, shifting before my blurry eyes as I saw the world around me rotate and a murky, bent block of something that resembled a face flew into view. Everything froze.

And then the poison washed over me.

I braced myself for what I knew was next: the call from deep in these bones, pounding in this heart, flowing in this blood, that would signify the end. I prepared myself for the ringing, deafening, silent roar of the void waiting to crush me.

I felt the seeking tendrils rush through me, over me, ready to steal my cannibal soul away, and - it was... _warm_.

I blinked.

The poison washed over me again, a tint of violet that swept through the eternal haze unhindered, and it felt... warm. It felt like _breath_.

I could not help the giggles that erupted from my throat.

Those warm, callused hands held me closer, cradling me. That deep voice, that cold voice of resonant steel and wintry iron, spoke something I did not understand in a strange, almost comforting tone. The poison kept on washing over me in waves, even as I laughed an infant's incessant laugh.

The toxins buried in the body of the one that held me could not harm me. By virtue of blood or some strange alteration, I was untouched by his poisonous breath.

I felt the boy's soul smile.

* * *

 _My mind wanders, and this is what comes out. These first few chapters will be short, sporadic and confusing, but that is the idea. What is the concept of rebirth but a plunge head-first into territory we can only imagine. When the main character finally grows from these biological compulsions, we'll see some proper story._

 _Until the downpour,_

 _A238_


	4. Abyssal Growing

The passage of time was hard to decipher. It was a riddle without words, without noises I could attach to it beyond my own breathing, my own tears and groans, the pitiful moans of an infant trapped by biology and evolution in a state of utter uselessness. There were no ticking hands to be heard, no wheel of numbers hung from a wall to watch.

There was just this ceiling of grey, these walls of brown and white, and the bars of the cot I laid in. It had taken an eternity just to figure out the space around me between the constant crying, the episodes of internalised hysteria as I flittered between lucidity and insanity, and the waiting, blackened hunger that wasn't the one dwelling in my stomach. No wonder a grasp of time was beyond me.

Maybe a window would've helped. But there wasn't one. I was sure of so little, but I knew who this body came from, who it was related to.

 _Hanzō._

Words drifted alongside that name. _Wary. Watching. Cautious. Paranoid. Akatsuki._

I could make sense of those few concepts, but the last was just a word. I knew it somehow but I could make nothing of it. But I disregarded in it favour of knowing why there was no sun in this world of mine, this room I had stolen from its rightful occupant, this cot, this body, this mind, these eyes, this face I wore like the prize of some deranged killer.

Lucidity brought guilt in toxic waves.

It sat beneath all my thoughts, the same way the presence of another always sat at the edge of my muddied perceptions. It filled everything, the knowledge that I was injected into this little boy's body by the abyss that spat me out like a foul-tasting bite of burnt flesh, that I had begun to eat and swallow everything my soul could reach like the void that had rejected me, that I had started devouring another living, breathing being's spirit. I'd gone from prey to predator, hunted to hunter, eaten to eater.

I would have laughed at the bitter irony of that fucked up kind of Stockholm syndrome had I not been crying.

The gasps were making my chest ache, and the fat tears rolling down my cheeks were hot and stinging to raw skin at the edges of my mouth. I had experienced far greater pain, but this body had not. The biological dissonance was incredible, and the pain was just as awful.

The tears made more tears. The pain made more pain. The guilt made more guilt. Like bacteria, it began to divide and conquer.

And then there were sounds somewhere at the edges of my stolen senses, something opening and closing in a span of time that felt like days and nights but seconds as everything and anything wheeled overhead amid my tears.

I was lifted. I cried. I was carried. I cried. I saw light. I cried. I saw clouds. I cried. I saw sun. I cried. I saw sky. I cried. I saw stars. I cried.

The world flowed around me like water and rain as days became weeks and tears became sniffles and sniffles became melancholy.

The physical pain faded and I was carried through it all by vigilant arms, sentinel hands, and watcher's eyes. The brutality of touch against my skin became bearable, and sounds no longer grated at me like knives in my ears. My vision clouded in a fog like war lifted ever so slightly, and the haze of colours developed into something more like shapes, like walls and ceilings, wood and tile, hands and feet, brown eyes and iron masks that seemed to never leave my side.

Time was no longer a riddle. It was a waterfall of days and months becoming one, moments blending together in the stream where I was no longer me - the killer, the stealer, the cannibal - and the boy was no longer the boy - the innocent, the child, the victim - but we were somewhere in the middle of both.

And then I could move my hands and feet on my own and I was crawling, feeling a watchful smile upon me as my body moved across soft floors somewhere in a room with a window and flooding light. I could feel the curiosity of a child flood me as I fell through paper doors and grunted in fury when strangers picked me up and delivered me to the iron-wrought, venom-filled one. I could make noises and feel things beyond tears and hunger, moans and guilt. I could do things, I could see things, I could look at things. And it was wonderful.

It took me so long to realise that the body would grow, and to realise that I was becoming indistinct.

I was fading in and out of awareness as the sun and moon took turns lighting the sky, too busy always crying to notice the change. One moment it was night, the next it was a day that was two days later as confusing images and sensations tore through me at lightning-speed that I barely had a moment to understand when control was wrested from me once again and I could feel myself plunge into blackness, a silent, haunting laugh echoing in the depths of my mind.

 _The void._

 _The void._

 _Always the void._

It wouldn't let go. It couldn't let go. I'd touched it once, and it had begun to eat. It had begun to feast on the dying flames of a forgotten soul, using me as fuel for the black fire of my own demise. But the embers refused to fade, and so the devourer of all things now and forever, of all things that fell from space and time, could not swallow the last bite, could not take the last gulp.

It had spat me out into an existence that I did not belong to, locked me in a useless prison cell of blood and bones, and stayed at the back of me, calling, offering, pleading with a sweet siren song that resonated wrongly with the utter silence of it all. I wanted it gone, but the link was made. Like abyssal saliva, tendrils of nothingness were strung across the dimensional gap, always pulling and tugging back towards my final resting place, urging me home to my rightful oblivion.

 _Why won't you go? Why won't you let me?_

I would never receive an answer from that gaping maw of total silence. I would never receive anything more than a crushing sensation of overwhelming hunger I could feel from worlds away, a ravenous need to consume and feed that surpassed realities with no great difficulty.

There was no running from the void. It would find me, it would reach me, it would touch me once more, and it would finish what it -

And then I was thrust back into awareness, a heady wave of biting warmth inside and freezing cold on the outside. I was buried in blankets but I was still shivering. So warm, yet so cold. My eyes blinked tears and the pain was blistering as I felt something within churn. I could feel it reach and stretch and touch my insides, but what was inside those as well.

I could feel it glide and swim and coarse, rage and strike and rattle, soothe and blow and calm, burn and rise and scorch, and steady and settle and prepare.

It was... confusing. It wasn't mine.

It was his, the boy's, the child's. It belonged to the one I invaded. It belonged to the one I took the place of. It belonged to the one I ate.

It was _chakra_.


End file.
